Cutting Costs in Your Company? Find the Best Tools to Do More With Less.

While economists are predicting a strong year for the U.S. economy, inflation is high and companies in several sectors are cutting costs wherever they can. The tech industry is going through heavy rounds of layoffs, and many organizations are reducing their hiring.

CISOs may find their budgets getting tighter, even while facing a growing demand to protect their companies from threats. It can feel like an impossible situation. How do you do more with fewer resources? How do you shift your position from being perceived as part of the problem to being a hero with your CFO?

When your organization needs to cut costs, you have a couple options. You can reduce spending, which may include your largest budget item — personnel. Or, you can search for opportunities to improve your company’s efficiency. 

Efficiency improvements can take time, because they involve information gathering, analysis, developing a solution, and implementing process changes. If your business needs to see cost savings immediately, this often won’t be enough.

But what if you could implement a solution that delivers significant efficiencies immediately?

The Wasted Costs of Compliance Management

Years ago, one of the things that absolutely drove me nuts as a compliance manager was how many stupid wastes of time I had to deal with in managing a single compliance engagement. Every step forward came with a step backward:

• Charles finally submitted his evidence, but it wasn’t complete.
• Emma’s evidence was rejected by the Assessor.
• All of Requirement 1 is complete, except for Paul’s stuff — and he’s on vacation until next month.
• Sarah has questions that she saves for the weekly meetings, so her tasks will have to wait another five days.

There’s the time spent digging through emails and text messages hunting for files and submitted evidence. There’s all of the manual labor of adding information to a complex spreadsheet and the pit that grows in your stomach, because the minute you start updating status it could already be outdated. There’s the wasted time hounding people to finish their tasks.

Compliance engagements are overflowing with utter wastes of time. And a lot of that wasted time goes unnoticed — partly because everyone becomes accustomed to thinking that inefficiency is simply the nature of the beast.

But every minute wasted is money that could have been saved. And the time wasted on a compliance engagement isn’t a few minutes — it’s hundreds of hours. Tens of thousands of dollars. Every year. Down the toilet.

TCT Portal Cuts Your Company’s Costs

Doing more with less is the reason we built TCT Portal. 

TCT Portal is a compliance management tool that streamlines your engagements by automating those time-wasting (and money-wasting) activities. Here are a few ways the system helps cut your operational costs.

Streamline Status Checks

Typically, assessing your compliance status can take hours of data gathering and interpretation. TCT Portal provides you with an immediate, accurate, live view of your compliance engagement status. It doesn’t take hours to figure out the status of all your items, it takes seconds. 

You have a clear line of sight to understand what is completed and what remains to be done. Personnel don’t have to wait until the next compliance meeting comes around, they can log into the system and get the information they need in seconds. 

Automate Mundane Tasks

Even simple things can eat up a surprising amount of time — those little daily tasks like sending notifications and following up with team members, or reminding personnel to submit this or that evidence. But when your compliance management system automatically does that work for you, suddenly you have a lot more time back in your day, and your week, and your month, and your year.

Build on Your Efficiencies

The long term benefits of TCT’s compliance management tool allow you to gain even more efficiencies year over year. When you go into year 2 and beyond, TCT Portal builds off of the work you did the previous year. You can pick up where you left off rather than starting from scratch every annual compliance cycle. 

It’s like having all your ingredients measured out and organized in front of you before you begin baking a cake.

With just a glance, you can see who did what last year and what evidence was accepted by the Assessor. Last year’s evidence is also immediately available at your fingertips, so in many cases, resubmission of evidence is significantly streamlined.

Take on New Certifications Easier

What happens if an ideal prospective customer comes along and says they need you to be compliant with a new standard? This customer could help relieve a lot of your financial concerns and allow you to reduce your cost cutting measures — but ramping up a new compliance standard is costly and time intensive.

TCT Portal can streamline the process, dramatically reducing your time without draining your resources. Here’s how.

Related: How to Add Multiple Compliance Certifications Without Losing Your Mind

Use the TCT Portal to create a customized document request list. Combine all of the items you need for all of your certifications into one list. If you’re going up against PCI DSS, for example, that standard alone likely covers 90 percent of your other certification requirements. Instead of submitting the same evidence multiple times for several different standards, you can load everything to the document request list just once. 

TCT Portal’s mapping capabilities allow the system to then populate those documents in every one of your compliance engagements, in the exact line items they belong to.

When you add a new standard to the mix, you can take advantage of TCT’s mapping capabilities and simply focus on the few new requirements that aren’t already covered by your other standards. You’re up and running with a new compliance standard in no time, with little disruption and minimal burden on your staff. 

Meanwhile, you’re taking advantage of the efficiencies you had the foresight to integrate into your annual compliance approach.

What Kind of Cost Savings Are We Talking About?

To be clear, you won’t save a handful of hours with TCT Portal. You’ll save a TON of time — precious man-hours that add up fast. How much of a difference does TCT Portal make? You could reduce your manual labor on compliance engagements by as much as 65 percent. For most organizations, you’re looking at hundreds of man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars saved every year. 

As a result, your company is freed up to make better budget-conscious decisions. 

If your company needs to do more with less due to cost-cutting initiatives, TCT Portal can make a major impact on your company’s bottom line.

Not only does TCT Portal reduce the wasted expense of your personnel dumping wasted time into your compliance engagement, it also frees them up for other work. This allows you to make more effective use of the resources you already have. Your personnel become more productive, delivering more results for your company, which helps you gain traction in the marketplace.

Instead of having people blow 10 to 20 hours a week on useless activities, they can focus on the job at hand and use their time productively for the organization.

Take the Compliance Department from Cost Center to Profit Booster

I am not a fan of wasting valuable time or money, and that’s why TCT Portal was built. TCT Portal creates incredible efficiencies for organizations, so they don’t need to blow time and money — especially when cutting costs is top of mind throughout the company.

For CISOs facing budget cuts and hiring restrictions — and possibly even departmental layoffs — TCT Portal helps you to be a part of the solution to boost your bottom line. Security and compliance don’t have to be counted as a cost center. 

Instead, you can be a change agent. Use TCT Portal to provide opportunities that make your company more productive, more profitable, with improved flexibility to reallocate valuable resources.

Discover how much time and money your company could save with TCT Portal — check out our ROI calculator now.